Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The three of them stood and stared after her, watching her heels flicker up the stairs like little flesh-toned mallets tacking down a carpet.

Upstairs in the hall, where there were no longer guests to be reckoned with, she made a bee-line for the dressing-room door, elbowing everyone aside and almost stumbling in her haste to get in there. The door clapped shut after her.

“Somebody help me to get out of here, quick!” she gasped. They all turned on the long dressing-bench and stared at her with one accord.

“There’re two men down there—”

“Two?” one girl said. “There must be twenty-five.”

“This isn’t anything to joke about. These two are cops. They’re standing right down at the foot of the stairs. They’re waiting to take me with them.”

“How do you know it’s you?”

“They said so right in front of Renard.”

She had the dress off now. She was shivering from head to foot, and not from the cold, either.

“By why you? What’ve you been up to?”

She summed the whole tragic little story up in just two words. “My fellow.”

“What is he, a loser with the cops? I had one like that once. Funny, how those guys always make the best kind of—”

Somebody gave a scream of synthetic modesty, of protest actually more than modesty, and one of the two from downstairs was standing in the open doorway motioning to her with his head. “Are you going to come out of there, or do you want me to come in and get you?”

The inescapability of the thing made her lose her nerve for a minute; the brief reprieve to get out of the dress was now over, there was no chance of any further out, and she was right up face to face with the most precarious of all prospects: apprehension by the police on a provable and grounded charge. Anyone would have quailed.

She looked around at each of the other girls in turn, in a last-minute appeal for aid that was sunk even before it was spoken. “Marthe! — Desi! — Nico! — We all work here together. I see your faces day-in day-out, and you see mine. Isn’t there one of you will stand up beside me now and help me, when I need it the most? I don’t want them to take me, I don’t want to go!”

They just looked at her helplessly. One of them lamented: “What can we do?” And another advised with sorrowful resignation: “Go with them, Leone. You have to anyway, and it takes all the fortitude out of it if you welsh.”

The ghost of a mannequin, a few minutes ago so radiant and chic and lovely, came out of the dressing-room door and stood there looking at the two men who were waiting for her outside it. Not fashion-show johnnies though, by any means.

She was immediately boxed-in between them and trundled along. They were not gentle, not gentle men, because it was not their business to be. “All right, hup, downstairs we go.”

“What is it?” someone asked as she went past the crowd on the lower floor.

“She’s being arrested. First time in the history of a fashion show that’s ever happened, I’d like to bet.”

They took her in an unmarked police car back to the street where she lived. It knifed along glossy-black and somber, and above the jurisdiction of the stop-and-go lights, its siren moaning a dirge that fitted this terrible death-ride. Hope and love and freedom all in one going to their funerals.

And when they turned in there the street was jammed, packed with people, she’d never seen it like that before. Not even on the Fourteenth of July. Not even when another country’s President came on a visit.

But they were all on one side of the street only, they were kept back there, by a rope and by some policemen on foot, in a long black line, shoulder-to-shoulder and faces peering overshoulder, all looking over at the opposite side of the street. And on the opposite side of the street there was nothing by comparison. Two or three policemen standing around, looking very small and lonely in all that emptiness. And something covered on the ground, like when you throw something away.

The drone of the crowd hushed temporarily as the new arrival drove up and stopped, and in the momentary silence the crack of the car-door rang out like a shot, as Leone was taken out and they closed it behind her.

They took her over to the quieter side of the street on a long diagonal walk, for the car that had brought her couldn’t get in any closer, and long before she had reached there the crowd had started up its rolling, surf-like surge of sound again.

“There she is! That’s her. She’s the one the flat belongs to.”

And a woman began again, for the twentieth time, to anyone around her who would listen: “They were creeping up the stairs, hoping to surprise him. Suddenly he came out of the flat and started firing at them, right there on the stairs. They backed down a little, and he ran up onto the roof. You could see him up there, from the street. I saw him up there myself. They were firing up at him from the street, and he was firing down into the street at them. Then everything stopped, and you could tell someone had hit him.

“First he did a slow lean-over, like he was never going to fall, and then a somersault and then all the way down to the sidewalk — Blapp!”

Leone’s escort tipped one edge of the covering back. “You know this man?” And then, “You know the penalty for harboring a fugitive?”

She freed her arm from him and sank slowly to her knees, with a peculiar, little-girl forlornness suggested by the attitude.

“How does a nice kid like you,” he said, “come to get mixed up with such a type? You see what it’s brought you to. It’s too late now. You’re in for it now. You can’t go back and undo the damage now.” And kneeling there, sitting back on her own heels there, on that gritty Paris sidewalk, holding the dead head on her lap that had once kissed her, breathed against her breast, framing it gently with a hand against each side of it and rocking back and forth with it in aloneness and desertion and cold, she looked up at him and cried out in a bitter, defiant, and yet somehow almost exultant voice that rang up and down the packed street and hushed the jabbering crowd:

“And if I could go back, if I were given the chance, I’d do it exactly all over again! Because he was a real man. What would you understand about that? A real man. Just to know him, just to be loved by him, makes it all worthwhile. Go ahead, arrest me! Throw away the key forever! I still come out ahead...

“Still come out ahead.”

It started to get dark, and as nature’s generator went dead, the town turned on its auxiliary ones and went ahead working on its own juice. A sort of blazing neon moon came up all around that made the real one of six hours or so before seem as if it had been dim and dingy by contrast.

I kept right on standing there where I was while the changeover took place around me. I’d been standing there like that without moving for some little time now, as if I’d taken root on the spot. As if the impulse to keep on going had run down and needed winding up again. Or as though I’d forgotten what had brought me that far. But I hadn’t.

I was right at the edge of the intersection, my toes almost overlapping the curb-lip. Across the way from me, one flange of a street-directional sign spelled out “Lexington Ave.” Abbreviated like that, with no room to take in the whole designation. The second wing, at right-angles, was telescoped by perspective so that it narrowed-down and couldn’t be read.

But I knew which street it was. It was the right one, it was the one I wanted. It had been the street she lived on; now it was going to be the street she died on.